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Hip-Hop World Gives Gay Singer Support

When Frank Ocean, a rising star in the R&B world, announced on Tuesday that his first true love had been a man, he seemed to be taking a giant risk with his career.

After all, Mr. Ocean, 24, is a rising star in the hypermasculine world of urban music, where singers cultivate images as lady-killers. He is a member of the Odd Future hip-hop collective, whose rappers are known for using anti-gay slurs. No other mainstream R&B artists have acknowledged having homosexual relationships. For decades, even the rumor of homosexuality had ruined artists in hip-hop circles.

But how big a gamble was it? Mr. Ocean has received strong support from other artists, his record label and cultural commentators, while the negative reactions have been largely muted and equivocal.

That lack of uproar seems to echo a broader shift in attitudes toward homosexuality and gay culture: Coming out is not as controversial as it once was. Mr. Ocean’s revelation occurred just days after Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, acknowledged that he was gay. It also comes just months after Jay-Z, Russell Simmons and other hip-hop figures forcefully supported President Obama after he announced his support for gay marriage.

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Frank Ocean revealed this week that his first true love was a man.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

“Ten or 15 years ago Frank Ocean could never have come out,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African-American studies at Duke University. “It would have been death to his career.”

It is too early to tell if Mr. Ocean, who declined to be interviewed for this article, will suffer for his honesty when his debut album, “Channel Orange” (Island Def Jam), is released later this month. Sales of his record will be viewed as a measure of how much times have changed. “It’s going to be a kind of litmus test,” said Nelson George, a filmmaker and the author of the novel “The Plot Against Hip-Hop.” “You can’t really know the real impact of this for six months to a year.”

It is worth noting that several major hip-hop stars have seemingly remained silent about Mr. Ocean’s decision, among them Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Drake and Nicki Minaj. Mr. Ocean was also the target of dozens of death threats and antigay comments on Twitter, mostly from men.

“There is still a very nasty streak of homophobia in this country that we have to overcome,” Mr. Simmons, a founder and former owner of the Def Jam label, said. “I’m hoping the support by his friends and the members of the creative community will override it and, whatever he loses, he will gain more.”

But Mr. Ocean’s declaration that he had fallen in love with a man and carried on an intimate relationship for more than a year, which he made in a rambling, poetic letter that he posted online, immediately attracted support from Mr. Simmons, who praised Mr. Ocean for his “courage and honesty,” adding that his statement “gives hope and light to so many young people still living in fear.”

Other hip-hop heavyweights signaled their support. Jay-Z, the rapper and label owner, posted a long defense of Mr. Ocean on his Web site written by the critic Dream Hampton. Joie Manda, the president of Island Def Jam, said that Mr. Ocean “broke down a wall that should never have been built.” Female R&B artists like Solange Knowles and Rita Ora published supportive messages online.

And Tyler, the Creator, the shock rapper who has collaborated with Mr. Ocean in the cutting-edge group Odd Future, said on Twitter that he stood beside him. The statement was all the more surprising since Tyler, the Creator, often insults gay men in his lyrics.

The positive reaction suggests that there has been a cultural shift, music critics said. For a new generation of R&B fans, it seems, just as for the rest of the population, sexual orientation has become a less toxic issue.

“To even have a climate where a relatively young person — he’s 24 — is comfortable enough not only to intimate this in his lyrics but to make a statement about it and put it on Tumblr says we have come a way as a society,” said Joan Morgan, a critic and the author of “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost,” essays about feminism in hip-hop.

Jerry Boulding, urban editor for All Access, a radio trade publication, predicted urban program directors would still play Mr. Ocean’s songs if he maintained the quality of his previous work. “It becomes a question of talent — he obviously is talented,” Mr. Boulding said. “But he is going to have to pick his material well, because some of the things he sang about before he came out obviously won’t have the same meaning now.”

Ebro Darden, the program director for Hot 97, a hip-hop station in New York, said that Mr. Ocean’s sexual orientation would not be a factor in the station’s calculations about broadcasting his songs. “Hot 97 has supported Frank Ocean since before his record label knew what to do with him, and we will continue to,” he said. “I hope people judge him based on his music, not personal preferences.”

There have been gay rappers before, but most were underground artists who never gained mainstream popularity. In the Bay Area a group of homosexual rappers formed the Deep Dickollective in 2000 and tried to start a “homohop” genre, putting out four albums before disbanding. The white lesbian rapper Invincible has developed a following in Detroit. The songwriter, rapper and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello and the independent R&B singer Rahsaan Patterson have also come out.

Mr. Ocean might have been a target of greater criticism, several critics said, if he were a tough-guy rapper or a seductive R&B singer in the tradition of Marvin Gaye. But his music is about nuanced heartbreak rather than seduction. “He’s never been read as a hypermasculine R&B singer,” Mr. Neal said. “His audience is already sensitive to this kind of issue.”

Though he is not yet a major star, he is still a promising and in-demand songwriter. Last year he released “Nostalgia, Ultra,” a mixtape that received rave reviews and included the R&B hit “Novacane,” which has sold 185,000 singles. He also contributed two hooks to “Watch the Throne” (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam /Roc Nation), last year’s collaboration between Jay-Z and Kanye West, and wrote the track “I Miss You” with Beyoncé for her most recent album, “4” (Columbia).

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Tyler, the Creator, left, said he stood with Mr. Ocean, a frequent Odd Future collaborator.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

Because Mr. Ocean is an emotive singer who has written many songs about heterosexual relationships, his sexuality had never come into question until this week, when some critics noted the lyrics for three songs on his new album — “Bad Religion,” “Pink Matter” and “Forrest Gump” — seemed to address a male object of love.

Mr. Ocean had already decided to make his love affair with a man public in the liner notes to the album, but, as the BBC and other news outlets raised questions about his lyrics, he made the decision to publish a draft of those notes on his Tumblr blog on Tuesday, his publicist said. In that letter to his fans, written in December 2011, he said he had fallen in love and slept with a man he met four summers ago, when he was 19. The affair continued, he wrote, for at least two summers.

“By the time I realized I was in love, it was malignant,” he wrote. “It was hopeless. There was no escaping. No negotiating with the feeling. No Choice. It was my first love. It changed my life.”

Chely Wright, a country singer who came out in May 2010, said Mr. Ocean’s willingness to explain his emotions to his fans, to go beyond a flat statement about his sexuality, had moved her to tears. She predicted he would lose some fans, just as she had in the conservative world of country music.

“It was so emotional and correct the way Frank penned a letter to his audience,” she said. Gay artists, she said, had a “responsibility to tell our stories in a bit more detail so our listeners and our fans don’t automatically think, ‘Gay sex! Oh my God,’ so they might understand the true nuanced journey of a closeted person in a conservative world.”

Ben Sisario contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hip-Hop World Gives Gay Singer Support. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe